Will our 15 percent poor country get a jobs bill?

The new poverty numbers came out today, and they aren't pretty.
The Census Bureau reports that more than 15 percent of Americans
are living in poverty--a number that's gone up for three consecutive years and
is the highest it's been since 1959. (Here's how the Census Bureau defines poverty.)

The president has, however, called for the second best kind of
stimulus--expanded unemployment benefits--along with payroll tax breaks,
infrastructure spending and other
stimulus measures. The White House is of course avoiding the word
"stimulus," which has been a dirty word ever since that time in 2009 when the
country enacted less stimulus than we needed and then blamed it for having less
of an effect than we'd hoped. But a jobs bill is a stimulus bill.

Not so long ago, this wasn't a controversial suggestion. The
debate between liberals and conservatives used to be less about whether
stimulating a bad economy was a good idea and more about how to go about doing
it. Obama's plan emphasizes the kinds of stimulus--tax breaks, highways--that
conservatives used to like. So while his jobs bill
(pdf) and speech
certainly show a more spirited and combative Obama than we've seen in a while,
the ideas he's offering are hardly liberal red meat. They only seem that way
because the bars have been moved so far: Democrats don't do much standing up
for the poor and the unemployed anymore; they're too busy trying to defend the
notion that the government can ever do anything useful at all.

Where Obama does focus on red meat, however, is in his proposal for how to pay for the bill: cap tax
breaks and loopholes on rich people (as he's proposed before). It's a sound
policy idea--hedge-fund managers aren't going to spark massive layoffs because
they finally have to report their income like the rest of us do--but it's a
political nonstarter. Maybe Obama's just trying to call congressional
Republicans out with an aggressive opening bid, but I worry that the White
House's endgame is mostly an election-season talking point about why we didn't
get much of a jobs bill: the other guys cared more about hedge-fund managers
than the unemployed!

It's a fair point, and maybe it will work for him on the campaign
trail. But if employment remains stagnant and poverty is still on the rise,
he'll need all the help he can get.